[sverige]

I'm not saying you have to build a server to host your blog. You can host it on AWS or elsewhere if you get a lot of traffic. It's not that hard to get a domain name, host it somewhere, and write some HTML code.

Yes, it could be difficult and a lot of work if you think you need embedded videos that autoplay and follow readers as they scroll down trying to escape that and the pop up pestering them to subscribe.

[user5994461]

Hosting it somewhere on your own will not give you good analytics, a good clean theme, and a CDN. A wordpress does. You're going for a ton of extra work.

AWS is madness for personal projects. You don't seem to realize how bad you're about to be bankrupt when an article hit the front HN page. If you have a high quality picture, a gif or a video, it's game over.

[Turing_Machine]

"You don't seem to realize how bad you're about to be bankrupt when an article hit the front HN page."

I've had a couple of AWS-hosted pages make it to the HN front page.

I don't recall my S3 bill going up to any significant degree, much less bankrupting me.

S3 bandwidth is $0.023/GB at the most expensive tier. It's hard to imagine bankruptcy resulting from any text-oriented site, even if it does hit the HN home page. Maybe if you're hosting hours of HD video or something.

Also, I've never had any trouble using CDNs from an S3 page. Details?

[user5994461]

Bandwidth is $0.090 per GB. (You mixed it up with the storage price that is $0.023/GB).

Let's say the site is 1MB to deliver. That's nothing fancy, lots of text, css, logos, headers.

For 100k viewers, that's about 100GB of traffic, or $9 dollars.

How do you bankrupt yourself with your blog from there: By multiplying it.

1) You've got more than this single article => triple it.

2) You've got medias (picture/gif/video) that take 3MB => quadruple it.

3) My traffic stats don't account for bots/crawler => You're at the mercy of them or any dude who "ab -n 1000000 yoursite.com/logo.png"

A bill of hundreds of dollars for a personal blog might not scare a HN silicon valley engineer making $15k a month but that's much more than enough for the rest of the world. Even in western Europe, don't expect the disposable income to be much more than $100 a month.

[Turing_Machine]

"Bandwidth is $0.090 per GB. (You mixed it up with the storage price that is $0.023/GB)."

Correct, my fault there. I was somehow looking at the wrong chart.

"Let's say the site is 1MB to deliver"

I think your estimate of the size of a typical blog post is considerably at variance with the norm. 2-3K would be more like it. Maybe 100K with logo.

[user5994461]

The HTTP headers alone to do a couple of requests are more than 4kB.

The text alone of an article can easily be more than 10kB (that's about 1500 words).

3k might have been correct in 1997 for a single standalone HTML page with only text, very little text actually, and very little formatting.

100k is doable for a very minimal site.

[Turing_Machine]

1500 words is much longer than the norm for a blog post. The standard length for classic newspaper columns (in the U.S.) was 700-750 words, and most bloggers don't write posts anywhere near the length of a newspaper column.

By the way, are we talking about normal blog posts or are we talking about "sites"? What is a "site"? Wikipedia is a site. So is a page with nothing but "Hello, world" on it.

[watwut]

It is harder to make said html look nice - unless you are graphics designer. But also, it requires additional time to spend which matters.